Is ‘Sustainability’ Possible While the Human Race Inhabits the Earth?

I don’t know where this post is going. A comment on my last post set me thinking. The comment was from Smokingscot:

Use these sorts of things [being individual, single cup filter coffee things]. Convenient and an environmentally irresponsible. But hey I don’t drive a Humvee nor an amour plated Mercedes, like some legislators.

To which I replied:

I think that the whole human race is an environmental irresponsibility. How can it be otherwise? We can make tools …..

It is an interesting thought, isn’t it?, that, ever since the human race stopped merely gathering whatever was available to eat and using natural shelters like caves, and created its first tool, we have been ‘despoiling the planet’. Gosh, we have even taken metals from the Earth and chucked them into outer space! How sustainable is that?

Yes, we have been despoiling the planet. For example, we have located a granite mountain and hacked it to bits to make building stones. It won’t be long before the whole Earth is flat. Having said that, there still seem to be an awful lot of mountains lying around. Or have they been hollowed out? It is all very odd. I’m surprised that some academic has not postulated that Mount Snowdon must be hollow because the stone used in all the buildings in Wales add up to more that the quarries could possibly have produced. And what about those huge lumps of Welsh rock which were used to build Stonehenge?

Oh …. Just a mo. If all the mountains were ‘despoiled’ and used to make building stones, all that would happen would be that the land surface of the Earth would be raised up a little more above sea level around lower-level areas. Gosh! What a good idea! The rise in sea levels, to be caused by global warming in due course, would have no effect on human habitations! Better still, let us start building a wall made of granite and sandstone, all around the coast now, JUST IN CASE. It would make far more sense that going back to windmills to provide power. Also, it would provide lots and lots of jobs. In the best Keynesian tradition, the building of the ‘grand wall’ could be used as an economic balance – when the economy slows, building the ‘grand wall’ speeds up; when the economy booms, building the wall slows down. After all, even the most pessimistic warmist gives us a century or so before the world is inundated.

But I have been fixing an unbroken thing, haven’t I? The real problem is fossil fuels.

It doesn’t seem long ago that the budding warmists were trying to frighten us by claiming that oil and coal would run out eventually, and then what we do? Someone must have pointed out the logic fault in their argument; if fossil fuels run out, then there would be no further effect from these fuels on the climate. Now they deliberately avoid the idea of these fuels running out. Their projections rely upon these fuels not running out.

Will these fuels run out? If the volume of these fuels depends upon ancient forests, the extent of which depended upon a carbon dioxide rich atmosphere, and were laid down over millions of years, and they lie at a level beneath the surface of the Earth which is easy to get at, and not so deep for the material to be a boiling mess, then they probably will. If and when that happens, then humankind will have to find other ways to create energy. And it will – ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

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So, because of our ability to make tools (and I include the use of fire etc as tools), there is no limit to our ability to ‘despoil’ the planet. But the reality is almost certainly that, unless we keep on chucking metals off the Earth into deep space, the supply of materials is similar to the supply of mountains to make stones for buildings. Our puny scratchings of the surface are as nothing compared to the total of materials available within the Earth. Does anyone remember this?

It is a scale drawing of the Earth showing Mount Everest’s protrusion above the surface of the Earth. The arrow points to Mount Everest. You can see that the protrusion above the surface is minuscule, when compared with the radius of the Earth. And that protrusion indicates roughly as deep as we have been able to drill into the surface (although I might be quite wrong in that assertion, but not by a lot!).

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I once read a piece which said that the whole human population of the Earth, if stood front to back and side by side, could fit onto the Isle of Wight. Perhaps that island is not big enough now, but the idea is still potent. Nevertheless, over-population MUST be considered. Having said that, I don’t think that the UN’s Agenda 21, with all its secrecy, is the answer. ‘Secrecy’ is the key word. ‘Sustainability’ is a code word for ‘stable population’. Odd, is it not, that one part of the UN is doing everything it can to make people live longer while another part is trying to reduce the population? But I think that it is reasonable to talk about the human population – but not in secret. If these matters were discussed in public, here and now, then it may be possible to get the human race to limit its size on this Earth, without coercion. It would make sense for more epidemiological and social research to be directed towards this subject, and NOT directed to silly efforts to make people live longer.

Is that ‘conflict of interests’ just a coincidence? Perhaps not. Given the time and the money, that ‘conflict’ can be used to pull and push governments this way and that by just a little manipulation of the media.

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Cutting a long story short (time for bed), the only way that Zealots can control human inventiveness is by outlawing invention. That is what is happening to e-cigs, and that is what is happening regarding plain packaging. With e-cigs, the invention must be squashed; with PP, competition must be squashed. Neither of these subjects have any direct connection with health.

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SUSTAINABILITY means ‘retain the status quo’. In which case, human inventiveness must stop.

The importance of the ‘spatial’ calculation is that we can only be in one place at a time. The reality is that we ‘feel’ as though we are occupying whole swathes of territory, but that is an illusion. The buildings that we erect are made from materials that we have moved from one place to another. The earth balance remains the same.

Again and again we see ‘calculus type’ comparisons. That is, the calculation of DIFFERENCES. That is great for calculations of orbits of planets and such, but is a calculated fraud when applied to the activities of human beings. Calculus cannot be applied unless the original things which are changing were fixed, and a force was applied.
Doll et al applied calculus-type math to multi-variables. That is not possible. There must be a basic ‘verity’ before calculus can be applied.